Go Forth and Fail.

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success”

 - C.S LEWIS

Failure isn’t the opposite of progress. Nor is it a sign that you’re on the wrong path, not capable, or not worthy. 

It’s proof.

For, without failure, there is no data.

And without data, there is no growth.

Therefore, you must learn to fail properly.

Don’t retreat. Don’t rationalise. And for God’s sake don’t even think of making peace with the version of yourself that never risks enough to get hurt again.

Don’t confuse protection with progress.

Failure quite often hits deeper than the event itself.

By that I mean, you don’t just lose the job, the sale, or the relationship, you lose the narrative that made you feel capable. The glorious success story that made you someone. 

Strong. 

The version of you who could handle it. The story that proved you were competent, desirable, and in control. When that story collapses, it’s not necessarily the outcome that hurts, it’s the identity that dies with it.

And that can really fucking hurt.

The ego, for all its apparent self confidence, doesn’t fear loss, it fears exposure.

In this sense, failure is like a mirror. It reflects back everything you’ve been avoiding - the habits you neglected, the arrogance you justified on the path to greatness, the blind spots you refused to see.

So when something collapses, it’s not defeat, it’s data.

Information.

The brain treats failure like a threat because, evolutionarily, it was. Miss the target, miss the meal. Fail to escape, perish. 

But the modern world as we know it, doesn’t run on survival anymore, it runs on iteration.

And if you respond to every setback like it’s life or death, you’ll never take the risks required to live a full life.

Your brain is an adaptive machine. It loves to grow and evolve. 

But it learns most through error.

Every failed attempt is a micro recalibration - a neural loop closing and reopening, adjusting your internal perspective of yourself and your place in the world.

Neuroscientists call this prediction error. When your expectation doesn’t match reality, the brain updates its wiring.

That’s how skills form. That’s how mastery happens. 

Michael Jordan once said, ‘I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career… I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’

Jordan didn’t glorify his wins, he studied his loses, and his failures.

So when you avoid failure, you’re not avoiding pain, you’re actually avoiding evolution. Freezing your potential at the last version of you that felt truly safe.

Failure teaches faster than success because it speaks directly to the nervous system. It forces awareness and it rewrites habits.

Growth is not linear. It’s fractal.

Every collapse contains a lesson. Study it, extract the data, apply it. Ignore it, or worse, run from it, and you repeat it.

Face it, and you evolve.

Back to Jordan then, arguably the most successful, and certainly one of the most decorated NBA stars of all time -  It was his discipline that set him apart. When he eventually joined the Washington Wizards, his teammates were shocked at his work ethic. They would often arrive for practice to find that Michael was already there, practising his shooting, always trying to improve. He wasn’t motivated by success, he was haunted by failure. In the best way. 

He didn’t fear falling again; he feared failing to use that failure in the right way. 

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Somewhere along the line, we were taught that failure is proof of inadequacy. That if you failed, you were never capable to begin with. That the outcome defines the person.

Which was clearly nonsense to begin with.

Failure has nothing to do with worth. You failed at something, you didn’t fail as someone.

The confusion comes from conditioning.

As children, our sense of value was outsourced. We learned that good grades meant good character. That praise meant love and mistakes meant shame. We internalised a rule; success equals approval, failure equals rejection.

And so we grew into adults who can’t separate performance from identity, who experience every setback as proof that we are broken, stupid, or unworthy.

Also, nonsense.

Because self-esteem isn’t built through achievement. It’s built through self-awareness.

Through learning to say, “I failed, and I’m still enough.”

Reframing failure means detaching self-worth from outcome.

With every mistake, you gain more knowledge, more resilience, more self-awareness and more self-respect.

You become a more complete system. A system with depth and understanding. The confidence that you assumed you’d only gain from success, will eventually come from resilience. 

Embrace failure and you will finally stop asking, “Am I good enough?” and start asking, “What did I learn from this?”

Failure should trigger curiosity, not shame.

If you can detach those two, you become untouchable. 

Every time you fail, remind yourself:

“This is proof that I’m evolving.”

⸻

Failure is a mirror, but also a map. Once you face it, you stop circling the same mistakes.

protocol;

Step 1: Write down your last failure. And then list the facts surrounding it. 

What happened? Why? What did you expect? What actually occurred?

Step 2: Extract the data.

What did it reveal about your habits, assumptions, preparation, or focus?

Step 3: Define one small behaviour that turns that data into action.

A change in routine, a question you’ll ask next time, a boundary you’ll set earlier.

Step 4: Store the record. The notes app on your phone is perfect for this.

Keep a “Failure Log” - not as punishment, but as proof of progress. Review it regularly. 

Take care,

- James